This invention relates to the field of sending content to a target device from a mobile device. In particular, the invention relates to target identification when sending content to a target device from a mobile device.
Currently if a user of a mobile device wants to send content or messages from the mobile device to another device (for example, sharing visuals with a screen or music with a HiFi, etc.) they have to tell the device manually which consumer to target. This is usually achieved by picking an identifier (ID) of the intended target from a list of targets that the mobile device can currently connect to.
There are two problems with this. The first is that is that the user has to know the ID of their intended target and that is often not the case (for example, with conferencing facilities, etc.). The second is that the user has to pick from a list of connectable device ID's and, in some venues, this list may be large and so this search may take some time and is error prone.
It is known to display a target device's connection identifier as a Quick Response (QR) code on the device. This however has drawbacks. A user must be at a close range to the QR code and therefore the device in order to scan a QR code. Also, a QR code is an obtrusive unsightly label to have to display on a device. Finally, it is hard to change a QR code once it is printed so the device owner cannot set a target device ID of their choosing and is unable to change the code easily once it is displayed. These leads to problems of uniqueness.
Traditional high frequency (HF) infrared (IR) technology is used to send commands between devices, for example, from a television remote control to the television. It consists of an IR light-emitting diode (LED) on the remote that blinks at many thousands of times a second to communicate long bit patterns quickly (many bytes in a fraction of a second) to the television which receives them via a light dependent resistor (LDR).
This allows a high bit rate because the LDR is a simple component that changes its resistance when IR light hits the sensor. The resistance of an LDR can be sampled at many thousands of times a second (kHz) and therefore can receive signals from LEDs with high frequency modulation rates. This technique can also be used to transfer small amounts of data, for example old mobile phones used to use this technology to exchange contact details or “business cards”.
The problem with using this technology to communicate connection information for a device is that an LDR only determines whether or not light is hitting the sensor (i.e. it is either on or off). It provides no information of where the light source is in relation to the sensor or the device (for example, light can often bounce of walls and round corners and can still be received) and it is useless if there is more than one IR source in range since they will interfere with each other.
Therefore, there is a need in the art to address the aforementioned problems.